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Florida Governor Ron<\/span> DeSantis filed the paperwork<\/a> to officially launch his presidential campaign on this afternoon, but opted to join Elon Musk on a Twitter Space to discuss his campaign on Wednesday evening. DeSantis\u2019s decision to forgo traditional news venues in favor of making a big media moment with Musk marks a new phase for the social network \u2014 and one that would have been impossible to foresee back in 2016, or even 2020.<\/p>\n DeSantis met Musk on friendly turf. In spite of feints to the contrary, Musk\u2019s views are reliably conservative, with a focus on social and cultural issues that\u2019s only escalated since his decision to buy Twitter. Last year, Musk explicitly said that he planned to support DeSantis\u2019s potential bid for the presidency<\/a>, calling him a \u201csensible and centrist\u201d choice. Musk previously encouraged his 140 million followers to vote for Republicans<\/a> in 2022\u2019s midterm elections.<\/p>\n Musk has increasingly aligned himself with the political right<\/a>, including at times its more dangerous, conspiracy-fueled fringes<\/a>. Just this month, Musk propagated the lie<\/a> that the mass shooter who killed eight people in a Dallas area shopping mall this month was being framed as a white supremacist. In fact, as researchers confirmed<\/a>, the gunman sported at least two overt Nazi symbols as tattoos, including an SS sign and a swastika, and espoused white supremacist beliefs online.<\/p>\n Florida\u2019s governor and Twitter\u2019s new owner share plenty of ideological territory. Both Musk and DeSantis \u2014 Florida\u2019s self-styled \u201canti-woke\u201d governor \u2014 obsessively tilt at their ideological enemies (the woke mob or the \u201cwoke mind virus\u201d<\/a> in Musk\u2019s parlance). Musk has gone out of his way to relax enforcement and lift the guardrails<\/a> that once protected vulnerable groups like Black users<\/a> and the LGBTQ community<\/a> on Twitter, while DeSantis is systematically dismantling<\/a> any protections that queer and transgender Floridians once enjoyed <\/a>and blocking education around Black history<\/a>. (Things are so rough in the Sunshine State that both the NAACP and Human Rights Campaign<\/a> recently issued travel advisories.) Both DeSantis and Musk hold particular ire<\/a> for the transgender community<\/a>, which they regularly express by wielding political power in their respective domains.<\/p>\n